BIOS, HISTORIES & DISCOGRAPHIES                                         Back to Dr. Progresso 

This section offers a somewhat different take on musicians and bands.  Although I researched and wrote them, these are not my personal views or reviews.  These pieces offer brief but comprehensive overviews of a wide variety of musical artists from pop, rock and jazz. 

All of these pieces were originally written for the Collectingchannel.com website, which required of them that they be relatively short (which I got around by writing multi-part pieces until I was told to stop) and that they offer a collector’s perspective (including price quotes).  “No reviews,” I was told.  I wrote one of these pieces each day, five days a week, for about six months.  I made use of some of my posted reviews from this site, removing the review portions and retaining the historical and discographical parts, when it was appropriate.  Those rewrites are the least likely (with one exception) to be seen here in this section.  (The exception is my multi-part piece on King Crimson. I edited out a significant portion of one part, and put in a link to the original review, but in other parts you’ll find some minor overlaps.) 

I have reposted here only some of the pieces I wrote for the Collectingchannel.com: those I consider the most appropriate for this site.  For the most part they appear here as originally written, but I have occasionally added new material and all of that is enclosed in [brackets].  I have also edited out gross redundancies in multi-part pieces when each part began with a variation on the same introductory paragraph. 

Originally these pieces were supposed to be about 1,000 words long, but I tended to write longer pieces (the Patsy Cline piece is the longest – it did not lend itself to being broken into parts and is almost 2,000 words, and that’s after I cut more than 1,000 words, including several good quotes and anecdotes).  As time went on I was encouraged to make the pieces shorter, and in the last two months I was not allowed to exceed 700 words (it was assumed our audience wouldn’t read anything longer).  This causes several pieces to end rather abruptly.

Amon Duul
Animal House
The Animals
Louis Armstrong
The Beatles
Beatles Autographs
Beach Boys Smile
Tony Bennett
Victor Borge
Eric Clapton
Patsy Cline
Rosemary Clooney
Creedence Clearwater Revival
Bing Crosby
Roger Daltry
Miles Davis
Sammy Davis, Jr.
Debut Records
Thomas Dolby
Harry "Sweets" Edison
Ella Fitzgerald
Stan Freberg's Hit Singles
Stan Freberg's USA

Genesis
Dizzy Gillespie
Chico Hamilton
Hip-Hop
Billie Holiday
Danny Kaye
B.B.King
King Crimson

Eartha Kitt
Leiber & Stoller
Lerner & Loewe
Dean Martin
Paul McCartney
Microphones
Glenn Miller
Modern Jazz Quartet
Thelonious Monk
Moody Blues
Red Nichols
Charlie Parker
Pink Floyd
Player Pianos
Ragtime
Rolling Stones
Sauter-Finegan Orchestra
Shangri-Las
Bruce Springsteen
Stradivarius Violins
Sun Ra
Tiny Tim
Mel Torme
Pete Townshend
Dinah Washington
Working with Annie
Yes

http://www.holeintheweb.com/drp/navlogo.gif (29638 bytes)